Steven Spielberg is one very hip and cool guy, or at least he was a year ago. A piece in the February issue of W says that comic Kathy Griffin is still agog that Spielberg’s attorneys threatened her for joking during the 2005 Golden Globes awards ceremony that Dakota Fanning “had entered rehab.” (And imagine…this anecdote just collected dust for eleven months!!) A Page Six sum-up says that “lawyers for Spielberg, who directed Fanning in War of the Worlds, contacted Griffin after the awards and demanded that she apologize for the crack. When she refused, Spielberg’s legal lackeys warned that she would end up on the powerful director’s ‘shit list.'” Griffin told W that “Spielberg has a lot of fucking nerve. I don’t care how big you are, you will not trample on my, or anyone else’s, First Amendment rights. That makes me furious.” Spielberg spokesperson Marvin Levy told Page Six that “it was a very upsetting thing for a young child and her family. Obviously, to Kathy Griffin it was a joke, but why make a joke out of [Fanning]? She’s a terrific young lady who was there with her family, and it was very upsetting.” Maybe (if you want to be a milquetoast about it), but what adjective best describes Spielberg’s response?

This sounds interesting…kind of. Variety is reporting that Philip Kaufman (Quills, The Right Stuff, The Unbearable Lightness of Being) has signed to direct a biopic of legendary cult director Nicholas Ray called I Was Interrupted, based on a script by Oren Moverman (Jesus’ Son). It’s about the last decade of Ray’s life (he died of cancer in ’79), during which time he played an art forger in Wim Wenders’ The American Friend (’77) and co-directed (with Wim Wenders) Lightning Over Water, a documentary about his last days. The film will reportedly focus on Ray’s relationship with Susan Schwartz, whom he met when she was a teenager and eventually married. (Schwartz placed an ad in the Soho Weekly News in 1980 or ’81 looking for the right someone to share the Spring Street loft she’d lived in with Ray, and I was one of those who came by to look it over.) I wonder what middle-aged actor Kaufman will hire to put on that signature black eyepatch and play Ray? He’ll have to be tall and lanky with craggy features…I’m drawing a blank.

I was right, of course, in presuming that Last Holiday (Disney, 1.13), the Wayne Wang-Queen Latifah remake of the 1950 Alec Guiness comedy, would discard the finale of the original British version, which was written by J.B. Priestley. (Soon after Guiness is told his fatal illness diagnosis was a mistake, he gets into a car crash and is killed.) I won’t be seeing the new film until tomorrow night’s all-media screening (which I’m thinking of blowing off), but in his Variety review Joe Leydon said “it’s not at all surprising that the remake eschews Priestley’s audacious ending.”

The Chicago Film Critics have honored Crash as Best Picture and gave the pic’s co-authors Paul Haggis and Bobby Moresco their Best Screenplay award…great.
And Philip Seymour Hoffman won the Best Actor award, of course, for Capote, and Joan Allen won for Best Actress again (yay!) for her acting in The Upside of Anger. (She’s won something like two or three critics awards so far, right?) Cheers to Brokeback Mountain‘s Gustavo Santaolalla for winning the Best Original Score award, and to Werner Herzog for winning the Best Doc award for Grizzly Man.

Brokeback Mountain is playing well in the heartland, “averaging $10,000-plus per screen in such markets as San Antonio, Nash- ville and Columbus, Ohio,” says a Scott Bowles story in Monday’s (1.9) issue of USA Today. A neighboring story by Marco R. della Cava says Ang Lee’s drama is also becoming a popular date movie.

The first-anywhere big-media blowjob for Larry and Andy Wachowski’s V for Vendetta (Warner Bros., 3.17) is in the current February issue of Vanity Fair, and has been written by renowned media/political columnist Michael Wolff, of all people. This London-based political tinderbox of an action film will be screening before long, and I guess it’s about time to dive in. I’m guessing Warner Bros. is feeling fairly nervous about it, which, in my book, makes this grimy-and-desexualized-Natalie Portman-with-a-tennis-ball- haircut flick seem preemptively cool. Wolff, who’s seen it, says the film’s “punch line” is that “some of the world’s most famous towers are blown up — by the good guys.” Talk about running counter to mainstream post-9/11 sentiments, or about a film that seems destined, if not determined, to out-do Fight Club in terms of setting off tremors. I’m not saying this will happen, but if there’s an incendiary political-alarm potential in this film (and I do say “if”), who will be the first journo or essayist to launch an Anita Busch-like “first strike”? V for Vendetta is a big-metaphor flick with some kind of impassioned portrait of violent revolution as a brave and heroic thing. The passage that got me is when Wolff invokes and compares it to the gunfire-from-the-rooftops finale of Lindsay Anderson’s If… — the greatest mythological 1960s revolt movie ever made. However good or intriguing or deliberately alarming V for Vendetta turns out to be, I’m presuming right now that all kinds of political horseshit will be part of the process leading to decisions by Warner Bros. publicity about who in the media gets to see it first (or at least early)…just wait. (Yes, yes…I’m aware that James McTeigue is the credited director and I’m sure he’s a consummate pro and knows how to say “cut” and “once more, please” and all that, but we all know he was basically hired to be a flunkie stand-in for the Wachowskis.)

Defamer‘s Mark Lisanti is a good wordsmith to start with but… fuck it, I just like this one in particular: “There’s going to be an Ocean’s 13, and you know what that means: turn the incestuous-rich-and-famous-movie-star-friends-circle-jerk-o-meter up a notch!” If producer Jerry Weintraub wants to really deliver a total debasement of this once semi-respectable pseudo-heist franchise, don’t get Soderbergh to direct it…get Roger Kumble, Brett Rattner…someone guaranteed to slap-dash it and blue-collar it up.

The filmmaker interview for tonight’s “Elsewhere Live” is with Why We Fight director Eugene Jarecki, and even if I do say so myself I think it’s the best discussion I’ve ever done since the program began. I kept my questions simple and kept my irritating “uhm-hmm” sounds to a minimum and just let the guest go to town. And Jarecki is brilliant, and so is his film, which I’ve just seen for a second time. Why We Fight will have its New York and L.A. debut on 1.20 and then spread out from there.

In the wake of Larry Miller’s shutdown of Brokeback Mountain at his Salt Lake City Jordan Common plex on Friday, the Salt Lake Tribune ran a solid and obviously timely piece the very next day about why men who worship and cherish the rugged-cowboy tradition find the film so threatening. Written by Leonard Pitts, it’s simply called “Why ‘Brokeback Mountain’ is so frightening”…and here’s an excerpt: “[The lovers in] Brokeback Mountain…are not cute gays, funny gays, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy gays. These are ‘cowboys’, and there is no figure in American lore more iconically male. Think Clint Eastwood, John Wayne, the Marlboro Man. The cowboy is our very embodiment of male virtues. In offering us cowboys who are gay, then, Brokeback Mountain commits heresy, but it is knowing heresy, matter-of-fact heresy. Nor is it the sex (what little there is) that makes it heretical. Rather, it’s the emotion, the fact that the movie dares you to deny these men their humanity. Or their love.”

The Envelope‘s Tom O’Neil has the behind-the-scenes, numerical breakdown about how Capote won the National Society of Critics Best Picture award. It went down complicated, but David Cron- enberg’s A History of Violence got the most initial votes for the first three or four (or was it five?) ballots, but on the sixth ballot the 57 members — 26 attending, the rest voting by proxy — finally gave it to Capote over Violence by a one-vote margin. The 5 and 1/2 hour meeting happened at Sardi’s restaurant in New York City. Congrats to Miller and the team for the Capote win, and especially to Philip Seymour Hoffman for his first-ballot Best Actor triumph.

“As an active member of the LDS (Mormon) faith, a semi-new resident of Salt Lake City and a self-proclaimed cineaste, I find Larry Miller’s pulling of Brokeback Mountain rather hypocritical and in very poor judgement,” says Jeremy Porter. “Good ol’ Larry has been making mint off of morally questionable films for a long time now (Casanova, Hostel and Grandma’s Boy are all currently playing the same location from which Brokeback Mountain was pulled). While I believe theater management is completely entitled and justified to pull a film on moral grounds if they so desire, but if you want to take a stand, Larry — take a stand! Refuse to show the ‘immoral’ PG-13 sex-comedy dreck and soul-numbing horror films that are polluting our theaters and crowding out thoughtful pieces that might make a mensch of someone. Had he pulled all such ‘immoral’ films from his theater, thought I may have disagreed personally, I still would’ve applauded the move and said, ‘Here’s a man who’s finally standing by his principles and doing what he feels should be done, commercial interests and public opinion be damned.’ But by simply pulling Brokeback Mountain, he isn’t convincing anyone. So Larry, until you can make that decision, you’ll have to let viewers decide for themselves.”

“Apart from the news about Brokeback Mountain getting pulled in two cities, I thought you might be interested to know that in Oklahoma City last night’s Brokeback opening was packed,” says reader Kevin Costello. “Two theatres were filled with 45 minutes prior to a 7:15 showtime — the two biggest auditoriums in the biggest multiplex in the metro area. This without the film being screened for area critics at any point and a just-moved-up release date here. Now, Oklahoma is state so red the skies and buildings are coated in a tangible Matrix-like crimson haze (this might also be due to our abundance of red dirt and frequent high winds), but there were tears, cheers, and much after-film discourse in the lobby. I was surprised, to say the least. And I, you know, live here.”